CHRISTIAN SORG: Los Prados

From his earliest paintings, working within the grand symphonic concert of pictorial abstraction, Christian Sorg has found his harmonies and affinities outside theoretical or discursive paths that might constrain his field of exploration. Operating with total freedom, his nervous yet decisive gestures—sometimes gentle and tempered but always assertive—define force lines, create spaces, and integrate markings. In this way, the artist charts a singular, personal, vibrant, and emotive path, forming an intimate dialogue with the environments that sustain him. By recently choosing to develop a series of paintings titled *Los prados* (*The Meadows*), he emphasizes his deep connection with nature, the land, and the unmatched diversity of the world he engages with. He strives to capture its smallest, even invisible, fragments and transpose them into pictorial form, guided solely by the decisive and imperative moment of uninhibited, boundless creation.

It has often been rightly said—and the artist himself confirms—that Christian Sorg’s quest is one of painting itself, where the true subject is the medium. This formidable challenge never yields a definitive victory, as every canvas, drawing, or project represents a new conquest. However, it is important not to confuse this with the principle of “art for art’s sake” as it has been advocated in the past. Here, within the realms of abstraction, Sorg undeniably incorporates realities that he works with, shapes, and, above all, lives: the presence of nature, the influence of his immediate surroundings, the specific circumstances of the moment, and the importance of the human element—its emotions, impressions, attentiveness, and thoughts. His painting emerges as the result of a composite chemical reaction, unpredictable and circumstantial. This is where the magic of his art takes place.

Claude Lorent
Excerpt from the text *The Emergence of a World,* reproduced in full in the exhibition catalog.

Each painting in *Los prados* reveals the delicacy of stratification and a plurality of layers. Within this series, one perceives the ascent of curves as well as the truth of fractures. While they never entirely detach from a possible “recognition,” subject to intimate transformations by the painter’s invention, these bursts of vegetation are primarily evident in their colors and the sinuous paths inscribed in the hills.

These landscapes, “expressed” with brushstrokes and oilsticks, are never abstract, though always eluding direct description. They seem to emerge from much more than “a painter’s inscription” on the world’s surface. Instead, we feel as though we are traversing an entire world where the tonal heights are akin to elevations of the earth.

This world maps itself. As if the artist, journeying through the memory of these spaces through his canvases, shows us that living amidst these “Spanish meadows” equalizes, in a welcome democracy, the near and the far, the visible and the indistinct, the solid and the ethereal.

The time at work in these canvases is multiple. It appears through superimpositions and inscribes itself in multiple directions. This is a time one must grant oneself to experience a temporality explored and unfolded in layers and depths of field—gestures of the painting itself.

The meadow thus unfolds in its dual definition: shaped by humans (and doubly so through the painter’s interpretation) while also “restored” in its natural vacancy. This sensitivity is as evident here as in other works by Christian Sorg, notably those inspired by rock faces imbued with parietal memory.

In ten paintings, ten moments, Christian Sorg offers his perception of the landscapes surrounding the rocky promontory of the village of Calaceite. Painting itself courses in all directions through these canvases, imposing its forms, elevations, and dizzying depths.

Marc Blanchet 
Excerpt from the text *Los prados, the Aragonese Meadows of Christian Sorg,* reproduced in full in the exhibition catalog.